


ashes, ashes

by foxlives



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Sibling Incest, The Hale Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-21
Updated: 2013-07-21
Packaged: 2017-12-20 21:28:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/892076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxlives/pseuds/foxlives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bad things happen, when Derek gets what he wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ashes, ashes

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote the majority of this last fall, letting it languish for my hard drive ever since. it looks like it'll be jossed into oblivion on monday, so i thought i'd post it while it still had some semblance of canon.
> 
> **warnings** for incest, physical and sexual abuse, underage, and character death.

**part i**

He buries her with his bare hands and a shovel, old and flaking rust into the dirt. There is blood under his nails. His hands haven’t stopped shaking since he broke the California border.

He buries her with his bare hands and a shovel, and the shovel is old and his hands feel old and his sister was older than him, once. In two years—twenty-two months—in about two years, he will be older than she will ever be, and she will still be in the dirt, older than either of them. He already feels old. He feels older now than he has ever felt before.

So he buries her with his bare hands and a shovel, and the dirt feels cool between his fingers and her blood feels cold on his hands. He carried her three miles to this place, and he felt her blood cool between his fingers as he walked. He counted his heartbeats, and kept her left-side chest against his, just in case.

He buries her with his bare hands and she has no legs, she has only half herself and he knows that feeling, he has been missing half his own self since he discovered half of hers. He carried half his sister to their used-to-be house and now he is burying her, his whole family gone in the dirt of this woods.

He buries her with his bare hands.

*

So Derek used to have this sister, right?

*

He’s not good at beginning stories. He could never tell tall tales, never tell jokes, because all he could remember was the end, the punchline, the dead drop. Kate used to tell him, maybe his head was screwed on wrong. He would look at her like, why would you say something like that? He'd been sprawled out on her couch doing algebra homework with the TV on near-silent; she had come back tipsy from the birthday party some friends had thrown her. 

Twenty-seventh. If anyone was wondering.

He had been doing algebra homework but now he was watching her over the back of the couch, the way she was standing at the kitchenette counter with one hip thrust out and one hand bunching up the hem of her shirt, the fancy slippery material pushed out of the way to show a slice of nut-tan skin. Now he was watching her, wondering how drunk she was, wondering if she wanted him to leave because he didn’t want to leave, just looking at her was making him hard. He closed his textbook. He got up and circled around behind her and said, “You had a good time?”

“Sure,” she said, a careless smirk. I’d rather be here, it seemed to say. The rest of the world is nice, but nothing can compare to this.

Derek knew the feeling.

*

So Derek used to have this sister, right? 

Actually, that’s not quite right. Actually, Derek had three sisters; he had more family than he could count on two hands; he had friends and acquaintances and Kate. 

If we’re going back far enough, Derek had a lot of things. 

*

He buries his sister with his bare hands but then he’s done, then his sister is in the ground and he is left with his hands, dirt-covered and blood-streaked.

He throws away the shovel. You can’t really burn metal, not like you burn wood down into ash and flesh into runny fat. He knows this; he went into that house. He saw the stove and the faucets and the boiler, scorched and weakened but still recognizably themselves. 

He wonders briefly, a wonder built of seventy-two hours awake and blood under his fingernails, about the merits of people made of metal. He wonders, if he had built Laura the right armor, if he had knit her chainmail and given her a sword, if she would still be here, scorched and weakened but still recognizably herself. Maybe armor doesn’t do any good against fangs. Maybe his mistake is in thinking that he could’ve done anything for her, that he would’ve been better than her at anything, much less at protecting herself.

He draws the spiral, he plants purple flowers that burn and sting his hands, that get under his skin and for days he feels as if his hands are not his own. He should’ve worn gloves, but he didn’t think of it until too late. He should’ve worn gloves, but he’s not sure it would’ve helped. He should’ve worn gloves, but he's never been any good at protecting himself. 

*

He meets Kate at a bar, a good half a decade underage but she gives him spiked Coke and a smirk, her fingers trailing over his as she hands him the glass. 

“I get off at midnight,” she says, and winks. Derek clutches the glass. He can still feel where her fingers were, small warm highways over his knuckles. He smiles.

*

He has never been any good--

*

Ten after midnight and he’s coming with two fingers inside her, coming in his pants as she fucks down hard and wet on his hand. Her eyes are wide open as his fingers slide out of her, every muscle in his body gone suddenly lax, and she finishes herself off looking straight at him, coming with a groan and her head thrown back. 

*

Never been any good—

*

A year, two years after that, Laura comes back into the motel room with slippery plastic grocery bag, Winn-Dixie printed on the side because they’re in the south now. The logo is crumpled, the handles drawn together with the two fingers Laura has hooked through them, and Derek wouldn’t have known that’s what it read if he hadn’t stared at the same red-and-blue logo every few miles as they drove through Tennessee.

They’ve been driving through Tennessee for a day now, taking the long way towards the Atlantic. This is on their first I-90 journey across the states, and they don’t really know where they’re going. They don’t really know where they’re going, but neither of them like the heat. They should go north. They should keep driving to the Atlantic, drive and drive until they hit sand or a cliff or some equal warning sign, keep driving until the water is cool and salty around their ears and over their heads and it won’t be like fire at all, this death. This death will be a good death, icy and blood-tasting, and their bodies will grow waterlogged and sink to the bottom of the ocean and no one will ever find them, no one will call anyone and say, we recovered a ring. We recovered a bracelet. We had to clean the flesh off of it.

The hand was gone. The bracelet was warped. Do you want it?

*

He has never been any good at telling stories.

*

This room has a microwave, so Laura makes them cups of soup, the kind you just add water to. The soup is the color of the waterstains creeping over the ceiling, and Derek isn’t very hungry.

Laura doesn’t tell him he should eat. Laura is not his mother, and he is thankful for this for a number of reasons. She finishes his cup, and then lies down next to him—it's early on. They don't have much money yet, and single-bed rooms are cheaper; no one questions that they’re teenage runaways, elopers, and they make sure to stick to places that don’t care. Anyway, Derek doesn’t mind. Anyway, Derek feels better having her close enough that if the motel did catch fire, he could at least die holding his sister’s hand.

*

When they were kids, they used to play crack-the-whip, enough cousins added on to make this worth their time. Derek was always very good at this game, the theory of it making perfect sense to him even when he was five, six, too young to start being trained in any organized way by the pack.

*

Kate hides a spare key over the lintel and sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she makes Derek wait, sprawl-legged in the hallway next to her apartment door, for a couple of hours before she gets home from—wherever.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” she says. “I forgot. Call me next time, okay? I’ll try and get back earlier.”

She kisses him. She never answers her phone. 

Derek was always very good at this game.

*

The theory of it makes perfect sense to him even when he’s five, six: the moral of this game is to hold on, hold on to Laura and you’ll be fine. They teach this to him later on. Hold onto your family, your pack, we will keep you safe. Hold on, and you will be saved.

*

He could never tell jokes, never tell stories: all he could remember of fairytales were the morals. He’s not good at beginning stories. He’s not good at beginning anything.

*

“I think we should go north,” Laura says. Derek’s been thinking this for a while. Laura’s driving—Laura’s usually driving—and Derek’s holding the map so she can see, navigating her way into Kentucky with glances and fast exits that have the cars around them screeching their horns in fury. Derek likes driving like this, though honestly, Derek likes driving anytime he’s with Laura, her windblown hair streaking across her face in tendrils and the scrunch of her nose as she shouts over the roar of the slipstream. The air conditioning went out in Alabama, and they’re going to have to get it fixed, and soon, summer blooming up hot and damp. Derek doesn’t mind the humidity for maybe the first time in his life: the TV anchor last week said it discouraged prairie fires. He said that might be a bad thing, hindering natural growth and whatever. Derek doesn’t think he knows jack shit.

To get the A/C fixed, though, that means they’re going to have to settle somewhere, one or both of them get a job. They’re going to have to do that anyway, food money dwindling fast and gas money faster, and Derek dreads it. His whole life spent in one town, he doesn’t want to be transplanted into another. This thing, this with Laura and the car and the highway, this is different. This is good. This is maybe what Derek’s been waiting for.

He doesn’t think that often, that thought zigzagging fast to what caused this and no, he never wanted that. No; even if it was him, even if fault doesn’t begin to describe what’s on his head, it doesn’t mean he ever wanted this.

*

The police call the second day they’re on the road, when some hiker smells smoke. The house was still burning, they say. No one survived.

Laura’s mouth goes thin when they say that; the officer is speaking loud enough the Derek can hear, tinny and clear, and he balls up his fists until his claws start to come out, breaking the skin of his palms in even dotted lines. 

“Where were you,” the officer asks, "at the time of the incident?"

*

Derek gets a new phone after Laura stops calling, after he searches the motel she’d been staying in and finds hers missing. It was probably in her jeans pocket. Right side, front pocket. He doesn’t know what happened to the bottom half of her body.

He gets a new phone after Laura stops calling, after Laura dies with her phone in her front pocket, right side. The electronics store is large and new, with a warehouse feel and a chemical smell that clogs his nose. He buys a cheap one, disposable, and puts Laura’s number into it. Just in case.

The store is new but the man working the counter is old, fifteen or twenty years over the age of most of these employees.

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” the man asks.

*

He could never tell jokes.

*

Derek doesn’t recognize anybody. Derek doesn’t see beyond his sphere of pack, family, Laura. 

Derek sees Kate, but that’s different. He thinks it’s different because she’s equal, the closest to pack you can get as a human. Later, he thinks he knows what it really was.

*

All he could remember of fairytales were the morals.

*

“Where were you,” the officer asks, "at the time of the--?"

*

You can see your enemies, you can see your friends. Love and hate are the same, if you look slant-eyed. If you look the right way, it’s all the same, really.

It’s two in the morning and Derek is getting existential sitting on the lip of the bathtub, porcelain cold and slick through his jeans. Another motel room, this one in Maryland. They haven’t stayed in one place for more than a week since the fire. It wouldn’t surprise Derek if they never stayed in one place for longer than a week, ever again.

He’s never hated Laura. Not once. He wonders what that says about her. 

*

All he can remember from fairytales are the morals. 

*

He’s never hated Laura. Not once. He wonders what that says about him.

*

He rolls over, kisses Kate on her shoulder. She’s naked, the sheet kicked down around her ankles, and even half-awake Derek’s sure she must know what she looks like. He looks blurrily at the clock, wonders if he’ll have time to take a shower and still get to his first class.

“Going somewhere?” Kate asks. Her eyes are still closed, but she’s smirking and her hand has snaked out to find his wrist, pulling him towards her. 

He falls toward her, and she skates a palm over his back, pulls his hand to her breast and bites at his mouth until she has him writhing. 

He doesn’t make it to school at all that day, doesn’t leave Kate’s apartment. He sets up on the couch when she leaves for work, watching TV and waiting for her to come back; he doesn’t do more than glance at his phone, doesn’t even read the messages there. Is that a bad thing?

He wonders where Laura is, if she’s worried.

Is that a bad thing?

*

“Where were you?” the officer asks.

*

She slips shots into his Coke, watches as his smiles get messier and messier. She takes him out back during her mid-shift break, makes him come so hard he can’t see straight. She gets him a little drunker. She takes him back to her apartment, basic and unwillingly neat, like she’s just staying here and has to keep it nice for someone.

Derek doesn’t notice any of this until the next morning; as Kate pushes him through the door, he’s just trying to keep track of his limbs, of his feet that never seem to be where he thinks they are. Kate is kissing him, pressed tight, and he can feel her breasts, her nipples hard, and has the sudden, electric realization that she’s not wearing a bra. 

She pushes him back to the bedroom, getting him out of his clothes in what feels like moments, though Derek will admit that time doesn’t seem to be passing normally at all. Was it just last night he was coming with his fingers inside her? Was it just a few days since he saw her the first time, best thing he’s ever seen?

*

Laura stands with her arms crossed, feet bare and startlingly pale on the brownish mat of decaying leaves covering the forest floor. He picks himself off the ground, the same leaves sticking to him palms, the ass of his jeans.

She’s laughing. She’s laughing and the afternoon light is falling uneven across her face, streaking her hair and lighting up her eyes. “Ready to go again?” she asks. They’ve been sparring. She beats him every time, two years and as many inches on him; he’s catching up in height, but she will always be older, always be faster.

Laura stands with her arms crossed, feet bare and startlingly pale. Laura stands, and Derek picks himself off the ground. 

*

Is that a bad thing?

Derek wakes up the next morning, naked in Kate’s bed. Kate’s not there, but he can hear her voice coming from somewhere. The kitchen? He rolls over, dozes off again in in shocks of morning light spread over the bed.

Kate comes in after an hour, after ten minutes. She kisses low down on his stomach, she kisses the inside of his thigh. He arches against the mattress, head still fuzzy and the world too bright, if he opened his eyes. Was it just a few days since he saw her the first time, best thing he’s ever seen?

*

He sets up on the couch when she leaves for work. It’s been three months since he saw her for the first time. He watches TV, he waits for her to get back. He does this a lot.

She doesn’t come back.

*

Laura runs every morning, laps around the house weaving through trees and leaping over fallen trunks. He’s watched her sometimes, and he thinks she should be careful: she looks more wolf than girl, tearing silent through the woods and not disturbing a leaf. It’s unsettling, seeing a human run like that. He thinks she should be careful.

She’s his ride to school, so he waits, sitting at the kitchen table with Aunt May, drawing spirals into the dregs of his cereal bowl. Jamie's sitting across from him, lazily eating toast and checking his phone with a few swipes of his thumb. Derek hates him a little right now, a year out of high school and the pack actually listens to him. He's always kind of hated Jamie, though he insists Jamie hated him first. Their parents tell him, he's your brother. He's the oldest; he's going to be your alpha one day. 

Derek thinks, yeah right. 

Cora sits next to him, kicking a rhythm against the table leg that echoes inside Derek's head; he's maybe a little hungover. He snaps at her; she sticks out her tongue. Their aunt grabs Derek's wrist, says, "Be nice to your sister."

He doesn't say anything; she squeezes harder. He's starting to feel nauseous from the hangover, from the pain. "What did I just say?" Aunt May asks.

"Be nice to your sister," Derek mumbles, looking at the table.

"Good," his aunt says. "Apologize."

"Sorry."

"Good." She lets go of him, and he rests his hand on the table in front of him, trying not to show how much it hurts, watching the bruises fade from his skin. Cora looks pleased. Jamie just looks at his phone. Derek hates them all, a little bit, right now. 

He couldn’t sleep last night, or else he wouldn’t be up at all. He wishes he wasn't; he wishes Laura was ready five minutes ago. 

He couldn't sleep last night. He’s more used to Kate’s bed than his own, now. He likes that.

*

Kate winds her fingers in his hair as he kisses her belly, her hip. It’s less than a week until school starts again. He doesn’t want to go back to school, Kate opening up whole new worlds for him. School seems childish. School seems small. 

(School is riding in Laura’s car, sitting crosslegged on the seat, extra pairs of her shoes in the shoewell crowding him out. Mornings and late afternoons, and the light is never right, never whole. It makes Derek’s mind go crooked, but in a nice way. He hates school. He waits for Laura to finish softball practice, an extra half hour, and the car heats up, black paint sucking sunlight like a sponge. In the winter it’s nice; the rest of the time he’ll sit on the hood, staring out over the wasteland of the parking lot. He hates school.)

He kisses her belly, her hip. Kate moans, and that surprises him. Kate’s opened up whole new worlds to him, and school seems so small.

*

He watches TV, he waits for her to get back. He can hear something going on upstairs, footsteps tracing geometric angles across the floor. The TV’s on near-silent, and he watches the colors on the screen more than the shapes. 

A door opens, shuts with a slam. Someone calls out, “I’m back!” Another pair of feet run light over the floorboards, and Derek looks up. “I’m ready,” Laura says.

Who did he think he was waiting for?

*

He kisses her belly, her hip. Kate moans, and that surprises him. She tightens her fingers in his hair, and he looks up half-involuntarily, chin pried up and throat bared. He squirms a little against the mattress, and she smiles. 

She leaves bruises on him almost every time, red bruises mottling to purple. Usually spread across his stomach, and he gets a nervous habit of tugging at the hem of his shirt. 

She leaves more than bruises, too, long scratches from her nails the criss-cross the bruises, and during class sometimes he’ll slip his fingers under the hem of his t-shirt, just to feel where they were. Just to make sure Kate isn’t some kind of dream, that he didn’t go crazy one day, and imagine something wonderful at last.

*

“Where were you,” the officer asks, "at the time of the incident?"

“School,” Laura says flatly. “Ask my coach, ask my teammates. They’ll vouch for me.”

“And your brother?” he asks.

*

He rolls over and she keeps a hand on him, fingers sliding over his waist and digging in a little, just a little. He says, “I think I’m gonna shower.” For a long moment, he doesn’t think she’s going to let him go.

“Sure, sweetie,” she says. She doesn’t say, shampoo’s under the sink; he knows that already. It’s been three months, almost. He does this a lot. He does this a lot, and he doesn’t ask why she has three kinds of men’s shampoo under her sink. He doesn’t ask about her family. He doesn’t ask why she doesn’t ask about his. He’s pretty sure she doesn’t even know his last name. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t know hers. It’s not really a big deal. 

He takes a shower, water close to scalding and shampoo the strongest-scented of the three. If the pack isn’t going to smell Kate on him, it’s going to take some doing: he had a few close calls, early on. He still sees Laura’s expression sometimes when she’s near him, like she’s trying to puzzle out what’s wrong. Different. What’s different.

He takes a shower, he uses the strongest-scented shampoo. He stays in too long, rubbing his fingertips along the bruises and scratches still scattered over his stomach. 

His sixteenth birthday was last week.

He steps out of the shower after twenty, twenty-five minutes. He didn’t bring a set of clothes into the bathroom with him, so he walks back into the bedroom naked. Kate isn’t there, but he can hear her voice in the kitchen. Talking on the phone, probably. She laughs, and he feels a twist of something, something he gets every time he sees Laura with her boyfriend or Kate smiling at someone at the bar or Laura with her friends or Laura, or Laura—

(Laura with a boy’s hands under her shirt, Laura with her jeans open and some guy with his hand inside her underwear, making her cry out. Both times, Derek just stepping away. Both times, and he never did anything, just walked away and pretending the twist was something, anything else.)

He doesn’t want to be them, understand. He just wants them. He wants, he wants, and things fall through his fingers like sand. Things fall through his fingers like broken glass, nicking spots of blood onto his calloused skin. Things fall through his fingers like blood, used to be his and now just the dirt’s.

But he’s getting ahead of himself.

*

His sixteenth birthday was last week.

School starts, and it’s awful, it’s dull and colorless and he counts off in five-minute increments from the clock on the wall, waiting until he can see Kate again. He walks from Kate’s, most mornings, two miles along the two-lane highway that wraps around the west side, the ocean side of the town like a noose, not far enough into September yet for the sun to be anything less than baking. He’ll see Laura in the halls, and she’ll look at him with an inscrutable look that gets under Derek’s skin, that Derek can’t figure out for the life of him. “The pack’s worried,” she’ll say under her breath, if they both have an extra minute at the same time, same place. “You should come home sometimes.”

He doesn’t believe it. He thinks about when he did used to come home, after a week or five days at Kate's. His dad looking at him, saying, "You missed training." Taking him out the backyard, a little ways away from the house.

He snorts, says, “I’ll do whatever I want.” He can still hear the crack of his arm breaking, the pop of his knee dislocating. He can still feel the blinding pain as he laid on the packet dirt yard behind the house, feeling his body fixing itself, his dad standing over him.

"I'll do whatever the fuck I want," he says. Laura doesn’t get mad, doesn’t huff and look disappointed like Mom; she squeezes his arm; she says, “We’re getting takeout tonight. Chinese. We’re already arguing over how many orders of spring rolls to get.”

He wants to smile, and it makes him feel awfully shitty. He thinks of Kate, waiting for her in her apartment while she works a double shift. 

“Maybe,” he says. Laura smiles.

*

"What about your brother?” the officer asks.

*

All he can remember of fairytales are the morals.

*

Derek wakes up and it’s just him in bed, and it takes him a second to remember.

*

Derek wakes up and it’s just him in bed, and it takes him a second to remember that he’s at home, that he’s supposed to be alone here.

(This isn’t always how it was: Derek hadn’t slept alone from the time he was a baby to seven years old, he and Laura sharing a room and Laura getting up when he cried, pushing her small hand through the bars of his crib and stroking his forehead until he fell asleep again. Derek hears the story all the time, his sister lulling him back to sleep easy as anything; when their parents and aunts and uncles tire of telling it than he asks Laura and she says yes, she remembers it. 

When she was nine Laura got her own room, and Derek didn’t sleep for three nights. When she was nine Laura got her own room, and Derek snuck near-quiet across the noisy floorboards and curled next to her in her new bed and asked Laura to please, don’t make him leave.

She never did. They did this for years, understand. Derek never did like sleeping alone.)

*

Derek wakes up and it’s just him in bed, and it takes him a second to remember.

*

“They asked me, what about my brother?’” Laura says.

*

Derek wakes up and it’s just him in bed, and it takes him a second to remember that Kate said she’d be gone early, before he got up for school.

It is still early, the bedside clock spelling out 6:47 into the gloomy dawn quiet. Derek rolls over. He can hear voices coming from the kitchen. 

The door slams, and the voices die out. Derek’s awake, so he figures he might as well get up; he pulls on a pair of sweatpants, one from the half-drawerfull of clothes he’s accumulated at Kate’s. Splashing cereal into a bowl, he sits on the couch, watches the weather channel with the sound off.

He’s refilling his bowl when the front door creaks, wheezes open. Derek doesn’t move—wolf instincts—but it won’t help. The kitchenette is tucked into the corner by the door, facing the room straight-on: by the time he turns around, whoever it is could empty a round into his back.

He turns. He doesn’t recognize the man standing there, but he has Kate’s eyes and a semi-automatic, and Derek stays very still.

They stare at each other for a long time. Derek stays very still.

*

“They asked me, what about my brother?’” Laura says.

“I know,” Derek says. “I could hear.”

Laura stares out the windshield. They are in Nebraska: Derek’s starting to wonder if there’s anything, outside of cornfields, that’s real at all. 

“I don’t know where you were,” Laura says. “I lied through my fucking teeth, okay.”

“I know,” Derek says. 

“I’m not going to do it again,” Laura says.

*

Derek’s not wearing a shirt. He’s standing barefoot on the slimy kitchen tiles and the man with Kate’s eyes has his hand on a semi-automatic. Derek can see the glinting end of the grip next to the man’s wrist. There’s a smell in the air that he recognizes; he can’t place it, but it’s making him feel sickish and dizzy.

A minute, two minutes, five. The man finally turns and leaves, taking the smell with him, taking the gun with him and taking Kate’s eyes. Derek puts his cereal bowl down on the counter, and it clinks dully in the choking silence.

Was he supposed to know, then?

*

“I’m not going to do it again,” Laura says, and she’s dead serious. 

“What?” Derek says.

“I’m going to know where you are, every single fucking minute, okay?” Laura says. It’s not really a question. “You’re all I have left, do you get that?”

Derek gets it. Derek gets it more than she thinks, he’s pretty sure. “Yeah. I get it.” Yeah; you’re all I’ve ever really had. You and the pack, now ashes ground into the forest floor. But he doesn’t say that part. He doesn’t say anything for the rest of Nebraska. 

They drive.

*

He sets up on the couch when she leaves for work. It’s been three months since he saw her for the first time. He watches TV, he waits for her to get back. He does this a lot.

*

He stops at the gas station on his way between school and Kate’s apartment. He buys M&Ms and a Coke; he pays in loose change, and the laconic cashier manages him a dirty look. Even inside, it smells like gasoline.

The cement outside, oil-stained and cracked, is hot under the thin soles of Derek’s sneakers. He’s had the same pair since he started high school: not because he needed to, but he likes them. The gasoline smell is choking, out here. Someone drives away with their foot on the gas, and exhaust fumes filter through the air and even the humans are wrinkling their noses, and Derek can’t breathe for whole seconds.

He goes back inside. He forgot to buy gum, he pretends. Even inside, it smells like gasoline.

*

She leaves bruises on him, red and mottling almost immediately to purple. If she notices anything strange, she doesn’t say it. If she notices it takes a lot to hurt him; she doesn’t say. 

*

Laura catches his wrist, torqueing sharply, and he crumples to the ground. She crows in victory. He glares: he’s been beaten by his sister since he was eight or nine, but the skin of his wrist still stings, the bone still aches. 

Derek looks up at his sister, late afternoon light turning the flyaway bits of her hair to gilt. One hand over her eyes like a visor, Laura isn’t looking at him, but out into the woods like it’s a kingdom, the sole inhabitants of which are standing right here in the brittle brown grass. Out of breath and dusty-haired, like maybe they're the only ones left. Derek had daydreamed about that sometimes, before Kate, before this summer. Before this summer, and he’d dreamed of a world with frayed edges and only enough room for the two of them, living off the forest and the full moon and each other. No family, no pack. Just thee two of them. He’d thought it would be a good life. 

Laura’s looking at him now. “Want to go again?” she asks.

*

If she notices anything, she just presses harder.

*

The summer is baked hot, dry, dust cracking and brittle under their feet. The whole pack spends too much time human, too much time blunt-nailed and defenseless. Their dad buys a gun, set it on the mantle so that they can't help but notice it. Derek thinks this is supposed to be reassuring.

The summer is baked hot, Kate fucking him down on the mattress, behind the bar, behind his school. Kate letting him loot her fridge, eat cereal on the couch. Kate giving him spiked Cokes that make him choke and cough, but only the first few times. Kate being there, always, a switch in the back of his mind.

The summer is brittle and dry, Laura shooting him looks. Laura pressing him too hard against the ground, Laura asking, where were you last night?

*

His sixteenth birthday was last week.

*

“What to go again?” Laura asks.

And Derek says, “Sure.” Laura has him flat on his back again in seconds, but Derek’s used to this.

Laura trails a hand over his collarbone. Derek shivers. Laura says, “What happened here?”

*

“They asked me, what about your brother?” Laura tells him.

*

Her lips are soft as ash, moving over his stomach. Leaving bruises that he touches later in the shower, fingertips softer and less callused than hers. Her hands have always been hard, skin cracked and calluses raised on her palms. Her lips are soft and her hands are hard, and well, later on. Later on, driving through Tennessee with real ash under his fingernails and blood on his hands that feels just as bad, he’ll think about this.

*

“What happened here?” Laura asks. Her fingers are still on his collarbone, and Derek can feel them like white heat through his skin. Something is going off in his head, an alarm, but it’s bleeding into white noise and Derek looks up at his sister.

Laura asks “What happened here?” and Derek doesn’t know how to answer. Laura asks “What happened here?” and Derek says, “Nothing.”

This is pretty much a lie, too. Laura raises the one eyebrow he can see, her face too close and his vision going cross-eyed. She knows it’s a lie, and he knows it’s a lie, so it’s not really a lie, right?

*

They’re in a gas station in Nevada. This is after the fire. Derek’s buying energy bars for him and Laura, and when he dumps them on the counter with a five and his hand exposed the cashier says, “Oh, honey.”

Derek looks down. On the heel of his hand is a burn, gone glossy and red. He looks back up at the cashier.

“What happened there?” she asks. 

*

Laura gets up off of him and stands up and looks up to the sky. Her eyes squint and she visors her hand above her eyes, and she looks up at the sky like he is looking up at her, and she doesn’t say a word.

*

He sets up on the couch when she leaves for work. It’s been three months since he saw her for the first time. He watches TV, he waits for her to get back. He does this a lot.

His phone rings.

*

Ash is always whiter than he expects, snowy like a lifetime of stories have always taught him only the oldest, the most powerful of the Alphas are snowy white, pale-furred. 

Ash is white, soft between his fingers. The house is still burning.

*

“Hello?” he says.

*

Next to him, Laura is shaking so hard he can feel his own teeth chatter. The house is still burning, licks of flame still tonguing over the wood, the trees, the campfire smell of heat and burning wood.  
Derek can feel the smoke filling his lungs, and he wonders if that’s even possible. He wonders if this is even possible. Is he dreaming?

Next to him, Laura is shaking so hard, and neither of them step forward. The campfire smell of heat and burning wood, gasoline and seared-off flesh. Fat bubbling off black-burnt bones, and Derek can smell it so well he can see it, see it like it’s on a drive-in screen eleven, twelve feet high, and he is just there for something to do, he is just there to watch. Nothing can be done. Nothing is going to be saved by them stepping forward. There is not enough left of anyone to be saved.

Next to him, Laura crouches down. His teeth still chatter. 

Next to him, Laura stands and they watch their family burn down into the forest floor. Laura is too far away, not touching him anymore, and oh. It must’ve been him that was shaking. His teeth still clack together, a horror-movie skeleton sound. He wonders if there’ll be anything left to bury.

Next to him, Laura. “Who--?” she asks. 

*

Even inside, it smells like gasoline.

*

The house war nearing a hundred years old, floorboards black-scarred and nicked, plumbing always slightly suspect. The Hales had had it since it was built, passed down like a charm, like a guarantee.  
You will always have a pack. You will always have this house. You will always have a place to be.

How do you feel? Sad? There were generations in the house. There was a ghost story that Great-Grandfather was buried in the walls of the basement, packed in with straw and foundation columns, whitewashed over and planed smooth. That if you went down the steep cellar stairs in the middle of the night, urged your claws out and put your hand to the wall, you would hear a rustling sound. That was Great-Grandfather moving through the walls. Press your hand to the wall, claws out and sharp, and you would feel him pressing back. 

The house was nearing a hundred years old. Every dead packmember since was buried outside, orderly rows of bodies stretching out from the back door.

Great-Grandfather is in the walls. What have you given to this house, Derek Hale?

*

Next to him, Laura shivers. He is still shaking, teeth making skeleton sounds. Will the pack even have skeletons to bury? Derek doesn’t know how this works. Is he supposed to try to save them? 

They can’t be saved. He knows this. They can't be saved.

Does this make him a bad person?

*

He spent three months sleeping with the girl who did this. Eleven years older, if anyone was wondering. His sixteenth birthday was last week.

Does this make him a bad person?

*

Hold on a second. It’s three weeks earlier. Kate leans in, cigarette a shock of white between her lips. She leans in and lights the cigarette with a lighter and practiced hands, and for a second the alley’s darkness is eaten away.

She puts the lighter away, sleek and silver and slipping into her jeans pocket like water. She smiles at Derek. Takes a drag, pulls him in with one hand on the back of his neck, nails digging in sharp, making him gasp. She kisses him, the cigarette held between her fingers, behind his head. With a half a mind that he’s going to get singed, that that awful burning-hair smell will choke him, he leans in to kiss her. She bites his lip, presses in with her nails. He’s going to have tiny half-moon bruises along the back of his neck for maybe a day, if he’s lucky. 

Why is he thinking about this?

*

Who would do something like this?

He can smell the flesh. He can smell the burnt-yellow hair and the metallic ache on his tongue of blood, of pots and pans and boilers melted to soft-edged masses. 

Laura is still next to him. They’re still watching the house burn down.

*

When they were little he and Laura and a few of their cousins used to play in the back yard, among the graves. They played “funeral,” and they’d fight over who had to be the body. Being the body was boring, lying still for hours, sometimes, while the others got to mourn for you and dig a shallow grave at the edge of the forest, where it wouldn’t disturb the other, real graves. The others got to dress up in the best clothes they could find, to pick flowers and tie them up with string and strew them solemnly on your body. Throw handfuls of dirt over your folded hands.

Derek knows why he’s thinking about this.

*

Kate flicks ash onto the cracked cement, and Derek shoves his hands into his pockets. Her face glows in the heat of the cherry, and he thinks she looks amazing, awesome in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Awe: like she could build castles. Like she could tear them down. Derek thinks she’s amazing.

*

They’re in Nebraska, and Derek says, remember the game we used to play?

Laura doesn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t hear?

*

Derek thinks she’s amazing.

He waits for her outside her apartment door, sprawl-legged in the hallway. The lintel is bare; she didn’t leave a key. They never leave a key out at his house, always someone there to let him in. 

“Call me next time,” she says, but she never answers her phone. 

*

They’d fight over who had to be the body; being the body was boring. 

Guess which one Derek would pick now. Go on. Guess.

*

Go on; guess.

It’s not an easy question. There aren’t any bodies to speak of, if you want to be technical. Even the newer bodies in the backyard graves—Aunt June, last winter, and Grandma Anne, the spring before—were burned to ash. Century-old bones were charred. It doesn’t seem fair. Dead people shouldn’t have to die again.

Then again, what about Derek Hale’s life has been fair?

*

Even inside, it smells like gasoline.

There are no Martha Stewart, homey smells he remembers. He remembers damp fir and woodfires. He remembers the raw, bloody smell of fresh-killed carcasses.

*

He’s watching the house burn down and he’s not thinking about anything.

*

He sets up on the couch when Kate leaves for work; it’s been three months since he saw her for the first time. He watches TV. He waits for her to get back.

*

Laura is still next to him. They’re still watching the house burn down.

*

She doesn’t come back.

 

 

**part ii**

Ten months later, a motel room in San Antonio. This is as close as they’ve gotten. This is as close as they will get, until Derek is twenty-two instead of nearly seventeen and Laura is in halves on the forest floor. Then, they will go back to California.

For now, they’re in San Antonio.

It is almost hot, almost summer, almost a year. Seven weeks, and Derek will be able to say, I watched my family burn to the ground one year ago, exactly. I didn’t do anything to stop it. It couldn’t be stopped. I held my sister’s hand and we watched our house burn down and now I’m in love with her. 

Does that make me a bad person?

*

The day after.

The knees of Laura’s jeans are soot-stained; they haven’t changed clothes. Their backpacks are strewn across the back seat, leaking problem sets and corrected papers. They don’t have any clothes to change into. 

Derek starts laughing.

Laura grips the wheel tight and says, “Derek.” Her fingers are bone white and she says, “Shut the fuck up.”

He stops laughing. It seemed funny at the time. 

That’s not true: it seemed awful at the time, it seems awful now. Can your emotions get shot, like your nerves? Derek wishes he hadn’t laughed. Laura’s eyes look wide and scared, and it occurs to  
Derek that he’s never seen Laura look really scared before, not at school, not in that house with Mom and Dad and aunts and uncles, not as she watched broken bones healing themselves with hard eyes and a set jaw. He's never seen Laura scared before.

They drive out of Utah and it’s getting dark again, and Derek has never hated the dark but he hates it now. He wonders where Kate is, in the dark. He wonders—

*

The house is orange and they’re all wrong, flames don’t look like tongues. Flames look like dancers. Flames look like Kate’s hair in the mornings and he used to skip first period as she laid her arm over his waist, her hair falling across her shoulders. He didn’t think it looked like flames, then.

*

They stop for gas at a turnoff that advertises a MacDonald’s and a Holiday and that they’ll be in Montana in 56 miles. Derek doesn’t think Montana will be much better than Utah. At least they’ll be farther from Beacon Hills.

He walks along the edge of the parking lot, the asphalt bleeding crumbs of itself into the grass, and Laura watches the whirring numbers with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. The harsh light scrapes against the car, slides over her face. Derek watches her.

The gas pump thunks dully, and Derek climbs back into the car. Laura glances at him. She hasn’t said anything since she told him to shut the fuck up two hundred miles ago, but he’s not laughing now, and she looks less scared. 

“Do you wanna find a room?” she asks. He shrugs. He’s not sure he could fall asleep, not sure he’d want to. “Okay,” Laura says, and she pulls out of the station.

*

The police call. “Your uncle is in the Beacon Hills hospital," they say. 

They say, “First degree burns,” and Laura is the one who took the call. She says, “My uncle is dead.”

“Miss—“ the officer says; calm, nice-sounding, but they’ve never liked the police. “Miss, the firemen found him. He’s burned badly, but he matches all descriptions—“

Laura hangs up. “Who was that?” Derek asks.

*

They drive. They’re still in Montana. If he didn’t know better, intimately and awfully, Derek would say that this is the worst state he’s ever seen.

His sister next to him though, she makes it better. They don’t listen to music, they don’t really talk.  
Derek flicks the radio across channels of static until Laura grabs his wrist, says, “Quit it, Derek.”

He quits it, goes back to staring out the window. He’s bored, and every time he closes his eyes, he sees Kate’s face like a nightmare.

*

“Who was that?” Derek asks.

*

Laura hangs up.

Derek asks, and she says, “The police.” Derek sits up straight. His cheek feels numb, cold from the icy window glass. The world is dark and going by at eighty-five miles an hour, and Laura says, “The police.”

Laura says, “Uncle Peter’s alive.”

“That’s not—“ Derek says. He snaps his mouth shut, his teeth click together. Laura’s hands are soft on the steering wheel, and he remembers holding them, remembers the thick calluses on her palms.  
“How do you--?”

“I don’t know,” Laura says. “I don’t know, but they seem really sure it’s him.” Should we go back? She doesn’t ask. They keep driving. 

Does that make them bad people?

*

Derek stood and watched his family burn with his sister’s hand in his and now it turns out, his family didn’t really die. Not everyone. He has an uncle in a hospital in Beacon Hills, but they’re never going back. The rest are still dead; Uncle Peter is covered in third-degree burns, and Uncle Peter hasn’t woken up. 

They’re never going back.

*

How much do we know about Uncle Peter? 

He was the one who would call the insurance company, go to parent-teacher meetings, liaison with other packs. Everyone liked Uncle Peter. If there was ever any trouble, the pack would send Peter to them. Everyone liked Uncle Peter. He fixed things. 

He would smile at the kids, bring them presents. He would read them picture books when they were little, however many times they asked. He'd let them eat the extra piece of cake. He'd buy them the extra CD, movie, book. He'd play with them, whatever game they wanted.

Everyone liked Uncle Peter. 

*

Laura’s hands are soft on the steering wheel, but only when she wants them to be. They are callused and mean, when they want to be, and Derek knows because he’s held on tight to them since he was three, four. Since he could hold onto things. Since he recognized that Laura was the most likely to get out alive, and to take him with her.

So now they’re driving along a Montana highway and they’re both alive, so maybe Derek’s instincts are worth something. Maybe, at sixteen, he’s outlived most of his family. Maybe this is a sign.

Laura’s hands are soft on the steering wheel but every month they turn into claws: they are not what they seem, Derek’s seen her soft hands draw blood. She's not what she seems, sharp and callused and deadly. He’s seen her kill things with those hands. 

Maybe this is a sign.

*

Two days after, and they’re still wearing the same clothes. Laura’s jeans, her second-favorite, ripped across the knees. Her sweatshirt, laying among the carcasses of the backpacks. Derek remembers putting this shirt on in Kate’s bedroom, and feels a little sick. 

*

Imagine an police interview. 

Did you find out your uncle was alive? Did you leave him behind anyway?

*

How much do we know about Uncle Peter?

*

They stop at a Wal-Mart in Cheyenne. They can only escape Montana in half-hours, though, so they turn north again after that.

They buy shirts, jeans. New shoes. They get socks and underwear and Laura buys a bra, and Derek looks away. They get Pop-Tarts, and bottles of Coke. They change into their new clothes in cramped bathroom stalls. Derek’s eyes water from the chemical smell, and he wonders if this is better than smelling ash on his skin for the rest of his life.

His eyes are red when he goes out to the parking lot. Laura’s leaning against the car, and she looks at him funny, but she doesn’t say anything. They stuff their old clothes into plastic shopping bags and throw them in the dumpster. Derek can still smell the singed smell, the burnt fabric, but he’s probably imagining it. He’s imagining everything has a burnt scent, his life now backdropped with that roasting meat smell, hair yellowing and brittle and fat bubbling off bones. His life now is mostly spent scared, mostly spent running. He wonders what would’ve happened if Laura hadn’t survived, too. 

He looks at her across the gearshift. What would’ve happened?

*

It’s not really surviving. They didn’t run out of the fire, singed, terrified. Uncle Peter survived. They didn’t survive anything: they were just in the right place at the right time. 

Derek tries to explain this once. The girl looks at him funny, but he’s been looking at her funny all night. She’s got Kate’s eyes, Laura’s bone structure, Laura’s hair. He doesn’t fuck her, but god, he wants to.

*

At three or four in the morning Laura starts to drift onto the shoulder, so she gets out and tells Derek to drive.

He hasn’t really slept either, but he’s not sure he can, so at least he won’t run them off the road. He remembers learning this, their dad taking him out on the winding gravel roads around their house. He didn’t crash it then, he won’t crash it now. Derek wonders what would've happened, if he'd crashed it. Derek wonders what would’ve happened, if Laura hadn’t survived.

She falls asleep with her cheek smashed against the window, her mouth closed and her eyebrows wrinkled together. They don’t sleep peacefully anymore. They hardly sleep at all.

Derek drives until the sun comes up.

*

One night Derek slips into Laura’s bed, in the grayish motel room with the cigarette-burned sheets. One night Derek’s cold, and Derek’s never really been cold, so he gets into bed next to his sister. She doesn’t say anything. They both fall asleep.

One night Derek slips into Laura’s bed and he doesn’t do anything. He thinks about lying next to Kate and how he couldn’t sleep alone all summer. He thinks about Laura, her warm skin, how her eyes are so different from Kate’s and she still smells like ash to him. He wonders if Kate would smell like ash. 

He thinks about Laura lying next to him and he thinks about Kate’s hands on him. He thinks about the girl he picked up at a dive of a bar three days back, and how Laura punched him in the jaw when he came back, said, “Never fucking disappear like that again, do you fucking understand.” Derek understands. His jaw still aches, a yellowing bruise creeping onto his throat, but he doesn’t really mind. Laura sighs and turns over next to him: neither of them have slept soundly for a year now. A year tomorrow. We’re back where we were at the beginning, and Derek is still in love with his sister.  
He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s lying in bed with his sister and thinking about Kate pressing him down into the mattress and biting at his collarbone, so.

Laura sighs again and she doesn’t look peaceful when she sleeps. Kate always used to smile when she slept, but it wasn’t a good smile. Why does he keep thinking about Kate? Laura sighs and turns toward him and opens her eyes.

“Derek?” she whispers. They are alone in a motel room in Houston, and the walls are paper-thin but still, no one will possibly hear them. But Laura whispers, “Derek?” and Derek whispers back, “I couldn’t sleep.” He remembers being a kid and crawling into Laura’s bed because she wouldn’t kick him out like his parents would, like his aunts and uncles would. Laura would let him curl up against her side and she’d only complain when his chin dug too hard into her shoulder. What would’ve happened if Laura hadn’t survived, too?

It’s not really surviving, what they do. It’s being in the right place at the right time. 

What would've happened? 

They haven’t been able to sleep in a year. Derek crawls into her bed like he’s five years old again, scared of the dark again. Except now he’s scared of bright things, fire and neon signs and girls’ eyes. The dark is a stupid thing to be afraid of, their parents always said. We thrive in the dark. The dark is best for us.

Derek's starting to understand what they meant.

*

Imagine an interrogation.

What were you doing in your sister’s bed that night? 

*

They wake up and Derek’s still in Laura’s bed. They wake up and it was a year ago that they watched their family burn and Laura sits up with her hair in tangles and looks out the window. There’s no curtain, no blinds, just a discolored stripe on the wallpaper above the glass, like the rod was ripped off the wall. It’s preternaturally bright, and it’s only seven or eight in the morning. Derek couldn’t sleep anyway.

Laura looks out the window. All they can see is a strip mall and a six-lane highway, Derek knows. He wishes there was a curtain, even an awful molding one. He might die from spores in the air, but at least it wouldn’t be bright. 

He probably wouldn’t die from the spores. Werewolf healing, right? He feels his jaw with two fingers, and it’s probably not even noticeable. He’s sort of sad about that—he wouldn’t mind it, if it stayed. 

Later on, after she’s punched him and stopped yelling, she’d said it looked like he’d gotten into a brawl. Derek had laughed. She’d looked at him funny, like the girl in the bar had looked at him when he tried to explain that he didn’t survive: he got lucky. 

Laura’s still looking out the window, and Derek doesn’t sit up, staying flat on his back and watching Laura’s tangle of hair in the brightness. She hasn’t cut it since California, and it'd been getting long, even then. Derek likes it. Laura doesn’t; she keeps saying she’s going to cut it all off.

Neither of them say, _one year_. Neither of them say anything for a long time, and neither of them move, until Laura gets hungry and slides off the bed in a graceful motion. She sleeps in shorts and a tank top, and her legs look long and muscled, lovely. Derek closes his eyes. He does not, he does not fucking need this right now. 

Laura throws a pillow at his head, after she’s dressed and he heard the water running at the sink. They don’t talk much anymore; it's not worth the effort. It’s easier to communicate through body language, wolf language, and so Laura throws a pillow at Derek’s head and Derek crawls out of bed. Laura’s bed. He changes his shirt and pulls on jeans and he and Laura grab their backpacks. It takes them less then ten minutes to leave the room.

The desk attendant thinks they’re sleeping together, and smirks as Laura hands back their keys. Real honest-to-god keys, too, this place old and cheap enough to warrant that. The desk attendant thinks they’re sleeping together, and Derek watches Laura say good morning, watches him smirk at her. Derek clenches his fingers around the strap of his backpack. They get out of there, drive twenty miles in fifteen minutes. Texas is flat as fuck, and no one cares about the speed limits. Derek would like Texas, if it was a little farther from California.

*

There’s a girl in a bar that looks like Kate. The bar looks like Kate’s, he means. The girl—

The girl has nice eyes and chipped nail polish. The girl looks at him when he sits down next to her, smiles at her. He leans an elbow on the bar, leans into her like he remembers Kate learning in towards him. It used to make him feel small. He used to like it.

The girl smiles shyly, ducks her head. Derek wonders if that’s what he used to look like. 

It’s been a few years. He doesn’t remember what he looked like this morning. The girl is nice-looking, probably the same age as him. Neither of them are old enough to be here, but Derek’s been places he isn’t old enough to be in for years now. He turned eighteen last month. Sound familiar? The girl glances at his hands, which are fiddling calculatedly with the collar of his t-shirt. This is a trick Kate used all the time.

*

He used to do this when he was five, six. Crawl into Laura’s warmth. Sleep in her bed more than his own.

That’s all true, but it’s not what he means.

*

Imagine an interrogation.

*

Imagine a movie screen.

Derek can see everything like it’s projected, the little things Kate would do. The fingers trailing down his back, the teeth grazing his stomach. He can see it two, three years later, like it happened yesterday. So he figures, it’s not going to go away. So he figures, why not put it to use? It worked for someone. Why shouldn’t it work for him?

*

The girl smiles. It’s a different girl, a different year. A different bar. Derek smiles and the girl smiles.  
You don’t care about this story. What ends up happening is they fuck in the motel down the road.

He leaves before she wakes up. Laura doesn’t yell anymore, but she’s still awake at four o’clock when he comes in the door. They’re renting an apartment. Laura’s sitting up on the couch. The TV’s on mute. Laura doesn’t yell anymore, but he sort of wishes she would.

He sits down next to her on the couch, and he knows he smells like cigarettes and sweat and sex, maybe. Laura’s eyes are open, but he thinks she might be asleep. The television is flashing colored light over her skin, and it’s freaking him out a little.

He leans his head on her shoulder, carefully. She stirs, and it turns out she wasn’t asleep after all.  
She doesn’t say anything, but she lets him fall asleep on her shoulder with his eyes shut and the eerie TV colors flashing through his eyelids. His head moves a little every time she breathes. He sleeps better than he has in weeks.

*

They move around, the first few months. Motel rooms, mostly. Laura says they should go back to school. Derek flat-out refuses, and Laura doesn’t say anything more about it.

They settle in Georgia for the holiday season, and they both get jobs. Laura works at a coffee shop, Derek at a retail store. By the time they leave, they’re both ready to stay on the road for a month, a year. They’re ready to stay on the road the rest of their life. Derek thinks about driving into the sea.

Derek thinks about the sea and they drive along it, drive until they hit Maine and they realize they never bought winter jackets. They never bought jackets. Derek is bad at protecting himself, he knows this, but shouldn’t Laura have remembered something like that? Laura could survive anything, Derek’s pretty sure. Derek’s pretty sure that when they do go out, it won’t be by freezing. Derek’s pretty sure that when they do go out, it will involve a lot more blood.

The heat doesn’t work in their motel room and they have to sleep back to back to stay warm. Was this planned? 

*

Laura’s hair is dark but it used to be blonde, curly, back when she was a baby. Derek’s seen photographs. He remembers not really believing it was her.

Why is he telling this story?

*

He still has nightmares, dreams of blonde hair and ashy fingertips. Dreams of running away, the soles of his feet on fire. He wakes up when Laura shakes him, fingernails digging into his shoulder. He wakes up when Laura shakes him, claws digging into his shoulder, and he locks himself in the bathroom and sees spots of blood.

Laura shakes him awake and Derek sits up in a jerking motion, dislodging Laura’s hand. Paw?  
Laura’s hand. It falls from his shoulder, limp on the covers, and she doesn’t ask about the dream. It’s always the same dream, give or take. She has the same dream, give or take. Derek never really understood what a cold sweat was until last summer.

Laura lies next to him, then, and Derek sits up because he doesn’t want to fall asleep. Laura might be asleep in minutes, but she might stay awake too, and they might watch as the sun rises through the window, the light moving in a sliver under the plastic-backed curtain. Derek might finally lay back, his head on Laura’s shoulder like that night in front of the TV that hasn’t happened yet, and maybe he’ll even fall asleep. Laura has always had a calming effect on him. Laura could always get him to fall asleep. 

This is all true.

*

Laura’s hair doesn’t look like Kate’s, but sometimes her eyes seem the same. Sometimes, when he’s half-asleep or a little drunk, her thinks about sleeping with her. Kate, not Laura. Her mouth on his hipbone, her dark hair spread out over his stomach.

This isn’t really what he means. 

*

The heat doesn’t work in their motel room. This is a different motel room, a different year. The heat doesn’t work, so they lay back to back and Derek can feel Laura’s spine alongside his. It fits like a puzzle piece, or a sheath. They never did buy jackets, so they might freeze here in a motel room in south Maine. Derek’s pretty okay with that.

Laura shivers and Derek feels it down his spine. Laura shivers and Derek turns in to her side, and they lay awake in the cold. Laura chest starts trembling, and it takes Derek a minute to realize she’s laughing.

“God, sorry.” She’s whispering. Who could hear them? “Sorry, sorry, I just—“

Derek considers saying, _shut the fuck up_. Instead, he starts laughing too; she says, “This is ridiculous,” and he tells her, “You’re ridiculous” and it’s really pretty stupid. It’s kind of fun being stupid, though, so they laugh until their stomachs hurt, and Derek forgets about wanting to fuck her for a whole ten minutes. It’s pretty much a record, since that night in Georgia. He forgets about how she’s right there and warm and soft-skinned, hard-muscled, how the calluses on her fingertips would feel brushing across his chest. He laughs until he feels smaller than he did before, and curls up by Laura’s side. Do they fall asleep? Probably; Derek doesn’t remember.

*

(That night in Georgia: 

The apartment is shitty, mold crawling over the ceiling. Derek comes back late. He’s not drunk: he had to work late. Laura’s making mac’n’cheese on the stovetop. This is their second run in Georgia. It's been a few years.

Derek walks in and Laura glances up. 

Laura says, “You want some?” and Derek shrugs. He’s not sure if he’s hungry, but he probably is.  
There’s a constant itch under his skin, in his stomach, but he’s pretty sure that’s not the kind of hungry that some shitty mac’n’cheese will fix. He’s pretty sure nothing can fix this, something snapped in him and irrevocable. 

Derek sits down the table, the wood scratched and burned, and looks his hands: his nails are too short, his palms are too rough. He watches Laura out of the side of his eye, wondering what her hands are like. He’s not sure what he means by thinking that. 

He rolls his shoulders back, like he could turn into a wolf right here in the kitchen. Like he could add some scratches to the table, splinter this chair. Add some scratches to Laura’s back, turned to him and lovely. 

He thinks there must be something in the air here.)

*

That isn’t the whole story, is it?

Somehow Laura’s wrist is in his hand. That’s not quite right—his wrist is in Laura’s hand. Her palms are rough, her fingers hard. He might get bruises from her. This doesn’t particularly bother him.

Derek wants to add some scratches to the dip of Laura’s back, where she already has a crosshatch of scars, white and bulging obscenely from her skin. If she wasn’t Laura, if she didn’t have her hair and her eyes and her hands, Derek might think those scars are the most beautiful part of her. He has the matching lattice spread over his shoulder. 

Her hands, one around his wrist and the other spread out on the scarred and burned table. She says, “What are you doing?”

He doesn’t remember doing anything. He remembers thinking about her back, her scars, adding some more. He doesn’t remember doing anything. He remembers wanting to kiss the knob of her spine that he can see between the collar of her t-shirt and her hair, tied up messily on the back of her head. But that is not a new feeling. He doesn’t remember doing anything about it. This is the kind of feeling he’s had since he was fourteen or fifteen, but he was never going to do anything about it.

He doesn't remember doing anything.

*

Kate looks at him, and smiles, lips slow and curling. 

*

This is what Derek doesn’t remember:

Laura walks by, towards the cloaking gas smell and violet flame that the stovetop gives off. The kitchen is shit; the oven doesn’t work and they have to light the range with a match, and Derek can still smell the sulpher and the gasoline smell, thick in the back of his throat. Water is hissing in the saucepan on the stove, almost boiling. Laura lifts the lid, looks in at the almost-boiling water, and Derek want to say _don’t—_

Don't what? It hasn’t boiled yet. Don’t look at things that aren’t ready, is what Derek wants to say. He bites down. It would be a strange warning. 

Instead he says “Laura?” and as she walks by him, he reaches for her back. He touches the thick scars underneath her thin t-shirt, and she stops walking. He doesn’t drop his hand. He doesn’t know what’s happening, everything going by at a quarter of its usual speed. 

Somehow his wrist is in Laura’s hand. Her palms are rough, her fingers hard. He might get bruises from her.

“What are you doing?” she asks. 

*

That isn’t the whole story, is it?

*

The winter is cold, once they get to a place that has winter. The cold sets up under Derek's skin, a second skin underneath the first. They find a motel with working heat. Derek sleeps in his own bed.

Actually, Derek doesn’t sleep in his own bed hardly at all. His hands careful on the doorknob, his breath clouding from his mouth as he starts Laura’s car. He finds the closest bar, and the second-closest, and ends up going into the third. If Laura comes looking for him, it might take her a few extra minutes. If Laura comes looking for him.

He orders a beer and no one asks for his ID. Does he really look that old? There is a girl two stools down with electric-blue eyeliner and matching nail polish, and he turns to her. Can I get you something? He thinks that’s what he’s supposed to say.

She turns her head, and her silver hoop earrings sway dizzily. She looks at him. She smiles.

*

Kate looks at him—

*

Derek smiles back. He thinks this is what he’s supposed to do. He can see Kate’s lips curling. He blinks and says, “So, did I ask if I can buy you a drink?”

*

Kate looks at him, and smiles, lips slow and curling. She is lying on the couch, the TV on mute. Derek drops his backpack to the floor. The door clicks shut behind him. He goes over to the couch.

Kate reaches up, cupping a hand over the back of his neck. He bends towards her, trying not to think about how awful school had been today, trying not to think about how much he wants to talk to Laura.  
She’s at practice; she wouldn’t pick up anyway. Kate strokes her thumb under the collar of his t-shirt, and he closes his eyes.

She kisses him, licking her way into his mouth fast and dirty. He keeps his eyes shut.

“Aw,” she says, mocking. “Bad day?”

“Kinda.” He shrugs. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Aw,” she says again. She kisses him, and says, “I think I know how to fix that.”

That’s something of a lie, Derek’s figured out by now: Kate doesn’t want to fix anything, maybe not even herself. He likes that. He has been taught since he was small that the pack comes first, that the pack is most important, and he likes someone who says, that’s a goddamn lie. He likes Kate, self-possessed and uncaring for anything outside herself. Derek likes that she chose him. 

Does that make him a bad person?

*

He buys the girl a drink, and she wraps her fingers around this glass while looking at him from under her lashes. Her nail polish is chipped. She sips her drink, and leaves a crescent of sticky lip gloss behind. Derek looks at her, and all he notices is that the roots of her hair are the same color as Kate’s was.

She laughs and Derek makes small-talk, and something is twisting in his stomach. When she rests her hand on his arm, he feels something rise in the back of his throat— _come on, sweetie, come here_ —and he stands up. The girl looks hurt. Believe me, Derek thinks, with a bitterness he never would’ve thought he had: you don’t want to know.

“I have to go,” he says.

*

That isn’t the whole story, is it.

“What are you doing?” Laura asks. 

Somehow his wrist is in her hand. Her palms are rough; he might get bruises from her.

Derek looks at her, looks at his hand in hers. He remembers holding her hand as they watched their house burn down in front of them; he remembers smelling the ash, the warping metal and the flesh searing off bones. Does that make him--?

He ducks his head and looks at her callused fingers, wrapped around his wrist. She not holding onto him that hard. He can still feel the stinging skin, the bruises forming; he can hear the bone snap. He closes his eyes.

She's not holding onto him that hard, but she could. She could hurt him, if she wanted to.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"I wanted to--" he says. He remembers smelling the ash, holding his sister's hand and watching their house burn down. 

Now all he can smell is the gas scent from the burner, the chemical smell of the mac'n'cheese. His sister is holding his wrist, and the only thing that's burning is their dinner, maybe, if Laura doesn't go to turn it off soon.

She doesn't turn it off. She stares at him. "You wanted what?"

That's a loaded question, he wants to tell her. He wants to laugh. He wants to say, you don't understand, Laura. Bad things happen when I get what I want. 

*

He holds his sister's hand. He watches their house burn down. He spent three months sleeping with the girl who did this.

Does this make him a bad person?

*

He kisses her pulse point, her fingers still wrapped around his wrist. She drags him up and slams him against the counter, his head spinning, the hard edge of the plastic countertop digging into his lower back.

"I'm sorry," he thinks he says; her face is so close it's gone blurry, and he can't make out her expression. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm." He thinks he knows what he's apologizing for.

She has him by the wrist, her other hand under his chin. Her fingertips dig into his jaw. He's breathing hard, panicky; he lost his pack and he lost Kate and he's going to lose his sister too, he can feel it. Bad things happen, when Derek gets what he wants.

Laura leans in. Laura says, "Shut up, Derek, shut up." Laura kisses him.

*

That's the whole story.

*

Four and a half years later, Laura's standing, pacing the living room. The only room, the only room of the crappy studio apartment they have now. They're in New York, now.

"Don't go," Derek says, tonelessly, so it doesn't sound like he's pleading.

"I don't fucking--" Laura says, and bites down, Derek hears her teeth click together. "I'm going back."

"If you won't even tell me--" Derek starts. He stands up too, steps in, but Laura paces away from him.

"I'm your Alpha," Laura snarls; "I don't have to tell you anything." She turns to him, her hair swinging over her shoulders; hypnotic. 

Derek stops. Her eyes are red, glowing bloody, and he want to look away. They've never talked about this; they're never going to, because two weeks later Derek is going to find her body in halves on the forest floor. But for now, he stops. He stands there, his heart rate ticking up and he doesn't know why. Laura's eyes go back to normal. Derek feels a little sick.

"I don't have to tell you anything," Laura says. She doesn't look repentant. "I need to go back, I'm going back. It's just for a week or two."

Derek says nothing; Derek doesn't tell her that even a week of two in Beacon Hills feels like enough bad luck to last them for years. Derek opens his mouth, closes his mouth. He sits back down on the couch.

"Derek," Laura says, still hard-edged.

"Fine," Derek says. He sounds petulant; he doesn't care. He turns on the TV.

Laura sighs. "I'm leaving tonight."

"Fine."

She sighs again, long-suffering. For just a moment, Derek hates her. "Fine," she says. She turns away.

*

A week later, he calls her. She doesn't pick up.

He rents a car, a minivan, a little humiliating but it was all they had. He thinks of Laura in her sleek black car, and eighteenth birthday present from the pack. He feels ungainly, even doing eighty out of New York State, even speeding through Nebraska now and making good time. He feels too slow, too late. 

There's an ashy feeling in his stomach, crossing the California border; his hands are shaking on the wheel. He never was any good at protecting himself. What makes him think he could protect her?

*

He's too late. His sister dies before he leaves New York.

*

He never was any good at telling stories. 

*

Her hair between his fingers is thick, wiry. No part of his sister is soft, all hard muscle and jutting bones, nails sharp enough to be claws. Derek keeps his eyes open. Derek watches her.

He can hear his heart, pounding, and he wants to put a hand over his chest to make sure it doesn't break through. He keeps his hands on Laura's waist, though, and his eyes open. He watches her. He makes sure that she doesn't turn in to Kate.

Derek is terrified; he can feel in in the back of his throat. He thinks he wants this, though. He's wanted this since he was fourteen. He keeps his eyes open, and kisses the scar curling over his sister's shoulder. Kate had scars, but not there. Kate had scars, but Kate isn't his sister, and it's different this time. He keeps his eyes open.

*

Bad things happen, when Derek gets what he wants

*

He buries her--

*

He kisses the inside of her wrist, the sharp curve of her hipbone. She buries her fingers in his hair, curls them until it hurts. Her fingertips are callused. He closes his eyes.

*

He buries her--

*

He watches Laura leave. He hears the soft sound of her backpack, the same backpack she used to bring to school and softball practice and toss with his in the back seat of her car, he hears the sound of her backpack being swiped off the table. Being unzipped. He hears her put something in it, probably clothes. He hears the creak of the door opening and shutting and he looks up, he wants to watch her leave but it's too late. The door shuts, and Derek looks down. 

A week later, he calls her, and she doesn't pick up.

*

He buries her with his bare hands and a shovel, blood under his nails. His hands haven’t stopped shaking since he broke the California border.

He buries her with his bare hands and a shovel, old and flaking rust into the dirt. The shovel is old and his hands feel old and his sister was older than him, once. He feels her hair, gritty with dirt, between his fingers. He feels her skin, cold and dead, and he remembers holding her hand. Watching their house burn down.

He looks at the house and he looks at the forest and he remembers exactly where they were, maybe twenty yards from where he is now. Now, on his knees with blood under his fingernails and his dead sister, half his dead sister on the ground beside him. He carried half his sister to their used-to-be house and now he is burying her, his whole family gone in the dirt of this woods. 

Her hair between his fingers is gritty with this dirt, with bits of leaves, with old blood. His hands are covered in it, brownish and dried-on. Her eyes are glassy. 

He buries his sister with his bare hands.


End file.
